Kill Screen and OUYA recently teamed up to offer a game jam for the OUYA console called the CREATE contest. We had roughly ten days to jam out a game and submit it to the judges.
Here is a video with an overview of my game.
I thought it would be nice to do a little post-mortem on getting this game up and running on the OUYA in such a short time frame.
Continue reading
What is mid-core? Defining this buzzword is a hot topic in the games industry. Here’s my favorite definition which I have honed through multiple talks with other developers.
Mid-core is a movement to create games using a balance of meaningful gameplay and broad accessibility.
Mid-core is more than a buzzword — it’s the natural evolution of games! It’s a movement. Hardcore games have some of the most memorable gameplay moments in existence but many contain large barriers of entry that seriously limit their audience. Social and casual games have the opposite problem. They are great at getting players to where the fun is and they do it as smoothly as possible, but keeping players there is difficult because the concepts are overly simplistic or exploitative. There exists something in the middle of these two extremes and this is the place mid-core aims to take us. But where exactly?
Continue reading
Many games try to make character development interesting by allowing you to make good and evil decisions throughout the game. Here is a thought exercise: what do you get when a character makes a good choice, then an evil choice, then an evil choice, then three good choices? SW:TOR and many others will tell you this is a good character, completely eradicating the fact that at some point the character was evil twice.
Alignment systems with one axis are pointless. They lack the sensitivity needed to create interesting characters because they only indicate the winning opinion and can’t remember the number, pattern, or frequency of opposing opinions.
If you’re only using one axis to keep a tally of good vs evil, there’s only one interesting decision to be made, once, at the beginning of the game. Will this character be good or bad? Once you’ve made that decision it makes all the calls for you in the future. If you decided to be an evil character then at all decision branch points the evil choices are positive points and the good choices are negative points. If you mistakenly choose good choices your character ends up not evil enough.
Continue reading